Herman Melville Master Ranking
Dedicated to the freaks out there like me.
I’m not an egomaniac, so I won’t sit here and claim to the be the world’s #1 Herman Melville fan, but in the grand scheme of things I’ve got to be at least 98th percentile all-time. In the Year of our Lord 2025, the only other human being I’ve met who has willingly read a Herman Melville novel is my uncle, who is a high school English teacher with a MA in Medieval Literature, so let’s just say that one is to be expected. And I’ve never met someone who has read multiple! Most people hear the name “Herman Melville” or the title Moby Dick and think of boring, pretentious old books that no one actually likes.
Well, they’re probably right, more or less, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t the best books you’ll ever read. I love Herman Melville. I’m a verified Herman Melville freak. I don’t even want to waste your time explaining why this guy rules so much so let’s just get right into this and you’ll catch on pretty quickly.
Here’s my rankings of every Herman Melville work I’ve ever read.
(Note: Whenever I mention editor’s notes for the short stories, they come from Great Short Works of Herman Melville, edited by Warner Berthoff)
18. The Bell Tower
“The Bell Tower” is the only Herman Melville story that I never finished.
The editor’s note for “The Bell Tower” in my copy of it writes that “‘The Bell Tower’…is in conception the most Hawthornesque of Melville’s stories and in performance the most inept”. Now, I’ve read a lot of editor’s notes of various stories and can confidently state that generally editors are not in the business of commenting on the quality of the stories that they compile, arrange, and annotate, so suffice it to say that in order for a short story to receive an introduction of this style it needs to be really bad.
Unfortunately I don’t have much to say either way about this story because I could straight up not tell you one single thing about it. I read about a third or maybe half of this story and found its prose so dense and its descriptions so intricate that I could not parse any semblance of meaning or imagery or plot from it.
Admittedly, I mostly read this on the train on my morning commutes, which maybe isn’t the best place to read something like this, but I read pretty much everything else on this list also under those same conditions so I’m inclined to chalk my issues up to the quality of the story and not anything else.
DO NOT READ.
17. The Town Ho’s Story
In many ways my problems with “The Town Ho’s Story” parallel my problems with “The Bell Tower”, but the underlying issues are different.
Ultimately, “The Town Ho’s Story” is a good short story. It might even be great. I just can’t remember, though, because this story is, essentially, a teaser for Moby Dick, so if you’re going to read it you’re frankly just better off reading Moby Dick.
I remember liking this story, but I read it so long ago that many of the details have worn off on me. Unfortunately for it, though, the details of other stories I read at the time (e.g. “Bartleby”) hold as fresh in my mind as the day I read them, which, again, I think speaks to the story’s lack of any standout features.
If you read Moby Dick and liked it, then maybe read this, but otherwise there are better uses of your time when reading Melville.
16. The Happy Failure: A Story of the River Hudson
“The Happy Failure” is one of many of Melville’s satirical stories. Its plot revolves around the narrator visiting his uncle, a local failed inventor, and spending time with him and his slave, Yorpy. Like many of Melville’s short stories, this story pokes fun at an overly capitalistic, hyper-individualized portrait of the American. The narrator’s uncle seeks to create a great invention “by himself” (with the help of his slave, regardless of his willingness to admit that) and it fails, as the title would suggest.
The story clearly pulls apart the mindset of a “self-made man”, questioning the value of constant, dubiously useful innovation while simultaneously offering critical (albeit underdeveloped) portrayals of men who view success as something that must be made on one’s own and of slavery in America.
There’s nothing particularly bad about this story and it's short enough to not be a waste of time reading it, but ultimately “A Happy Failure” doesn’t offer much that other, better short satirical short stories of Melville’s offer as well.
15. The Lightning Rod Man
I thought about grouping this story in with “The Happy Failure” because they share a lot of similarities. They are both very short stories that largely center around critiques of individualistic, capitalistic men, but I’ve put “The Lightning Rod Man” a little further up the ranking because I think this story ultimately has a lot more character. The lightning rod man in question is eccentric enough to properly engage you and the story is a lot of fun if you care to take a few minutes to read through it.
14. The Fiddler
“The Fiddler” marks the first point on this list that we get to discuss a couple of classic Melville tropes. “The Fiddler”, in broad strokes, follows a poet whose friend introduces him to a man that, for lack of a clearer term, the narrator becomes obsessed with. Something about the man’s demeanor, appearance, and attitude fascinates the narrator so much that the poet, whose career appears to be on a downward trend, drops everything to become an apprentice of the man, a professional fiddler.
Firstly, the story is, in the most blatant, clear manner, completely autobiographical. Autobiography, as a mode, haunted Melville so totally throughout his career that, while he never wrote a 2000+ page autobiography like his contemporary, Mark Twain, I feel confident that I know the inner world of Melville more deeply than I will ever know the inner world of any other person. Melville’s autobiographical tendencies, as we’ll cover in later works, approaches levels of honesty and transparency so intimate that sometimes you will wonder if Melville even intended to include it or if he just couldn’t stop himself.
Secondly, “The Fiddler” is homoerotic. As time progresses, homoeroticism becomes a more and more inseparable part of Melville’s work. What, at the time, was likely read as honest depictions of homosocial behavior and true male friendships (perhaps even by its author) has evolved into what we in the modern era would read as clear homoeroticism. On some level, like with much of Melville’s work, “The Fiddler” revolves around a man’s desire for another man.
The object of the narrator’s obsession is literally named “Hautboy”! Hot! BOY!
(This introduces another fascinating aspect of Melville’s work where, because of the intricacies of his wordplay, it often feels like Melville uses slang terms years or even decades before they would ever have been used in the way he uses them. This is most apparent in The Confidence Man.)
Without spoiling too much of the later list, the timing and content of “The Fiddler” align quite nicely with the release (and failure) of Pierre as well as the end of Melville’s “friendship” with American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. It’s hard not to see parallels between this story and Melville’s own personal experiences.
If these elements of “The Fiddler” fascinate or even excite you, hold your horses. While “The Fiddler” is fun to be sure, many of these elements come out in even stronger force on works further down this list.
13. Benito Cereno
“Benito Cereno” is the first work on this list that I can confidently describe as a “unique” work. Like with every work on this list, “Benito Cereno” shares many themes and tropes with other stories, but “Benito Cereno” offers a story and a concept that isn’t done better by anything else here.
“Benito Cereno” follows an American whaling captain, Captain Delano, as he boards a ship they find stranded near a remote island. Aboard the ship, Captain Delano meets its captain, Benito Cereno, and attempts to help Cereno steer the ship back out to sea. Captain Delano is struck however by a few odd things about the ship. Firstly, Captain Delano notices that, aside from Cereno, the Spanish captain, there are no white people aboard the ship. Then Delano notices that Benito Cereno has a peculiar relationship with the slaves on the ship. Lastly, Delano becomes convinced that Benito Cereno is hiding a dark secret.
The story follows an interesting tale about life at sea and a fictionalized telling of a slave ship revolt but tells it through the eyes of an American outsider, and a deeply distrusting one at that. As is often the case with Melville, the story’s depiction of black people feels a little muddy. It is often difficult to ascertain Melville’s perspective on the ship’s revolt, but the story includes a good amount of detail that, at a minimum, offers a lot for the reader to think about.
Despite how famous this story is, “Benito Cereno” falls a little far down on my list because, in addition to its difficult-to-discern perspective, the story is, for my liking, just too long. On some level, lengthy descriptions and internal monologues are necessary to communicate the paranoia that Captain Delano experiences aboard the ship, but often the segments just draw out too long for my liking.
12. The Two Temples
This middle section is where I think many Melville aficionados will have issues with my ranking. “You put ‘The Two Temples’ above ‘Benito Cereno’?????” they might ask.
Yeah. I did. It’s my list. If it upsets you, you’re welcome to also write 5,000 words about Herman Melvlle.
“The Two Temples” uses the classic Melville diptych. He didn’t invent the concept, obviously, but my god did he love it.
The first of the two temples is a vignette in which the narrator attempts to get into a nice church in New York City (most likely meant to be the Grace Church in Manhattan) but is turned away because he is a poor man who would disturb the clientele. The narrator then sneaks into the church to observe the service and is harassed by the usher upon his exit.
The second temple is a theater in London. The narrator stands outside in the cold without any money to seek lodging or food with. A stranger, unprompted, gives him a ticket to go in. Inside the theater a random boy buys him a coffee because his father went to America to seek a fortune and he wants to share the coffee his father would have had at the theater with him with an American.
“The Two Temples” offers a biting, if simplistic critique of the American upper class and, in particular, wealthy American Protestants. The editor’s note on my edition of this story points out that this was the only of Melville’s magazine contributions to be rejected. Even among Melville stories, the clear allusion to a prominent New York City church stands out as something unlike what he does in other stories and his vicious critique of the church explains what turned people off of it.
I really love “The Two Temples”, as I do with almost all of Melville’s diptychs, but this one is lower than the others purely because, as we’ll see, the others are just that good.
From here on out we’re in the zone of stories that are definitely worth reading.
11. Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs
The middle of my back-to-back-to-back ranked diptychs is “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs”, a story that conceptually hits pretty much the same notes as “The Two Temples” but through a different approach.
In “Poor Man’s Pudding”, the narrator speaks with his friend, Poet Blandmour, who I can only describe as the 19th-century version of a “life hacks” TikToker. Blandmour passionately tells the narrator about things like “poor man’s manure” (snow in March that offers nutrients to the ground) and “poor man’s eye-water” (bottled March snow, which allegedly keeps like alcohol). Blandmour continues on like this for an increasingly absurd amount of time until the narrator realizes that all of the “poor man’s” tools and food are, in fact, just ways of living that people will gladly share with those who need it.
“Rich Man’s Crumbs” is almost the exact inverse of the first story. In London, a different friend invites the narrator to an event where the local poor people are invited to eat the leftovers from a wealthy feast held the night before. The event is poorly managed and results in a near riot, causing the narrator to question how such an event benefits anyone, if most people are just getting worthless scraps and crumbs.
The setup required to get to the meat of these stories is a little involved but the two tales carry a wonderfully comedic, satirical tone that hits on a rather fascinating core critique of the way wealthy people view poor people. This is one of the Melville stories that truly feels as poignant and punchy today as it would have felt when it came out, and in some ways even more so.
I particularly love the passage,
“you are not what may rightly be called a rich man; you have a fair competence; no more. Is it not so? Well, then, I do not include you, when I say, that if ever a Rich Man speaks prosperously to me of a Poor Man, I shall set it down as—I won’t mention the word.”
10. Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids
“Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids” is my favorite of the three diptychs and one of the most famous examples of gender exploration in Melville’s work. As the title suggests, the first story tells the tale of a group of bachelor men who meet to eat, drink, and converse, free from the world of sex and gender. The second story tells of a paper mill owned by a man and operated entirely by women.
The two stories, especially next to each other, carry heavy commentary on gender in many directions. “Paradise of Bachelors” invites the reader to imagine a world where men exist free from the kind of “sexual responsibility” that comes with the traditional family-making roles imposed on them and what a paradise that world would be. “Tartarus of Maids” then brings the reader into a world of similar construction for women, but then calls to the inequality of the two genders, caused by men’s cultural ownership of women.
It’s a complex pair of vignettes that exemplifies the depth of Melville’s relationship with gender and sexuality. These two stories demonstrate the aspects of Melville that I love the most.
9. The Encantadas or Enchanted Isles
A more traditional vignette collection, “The Encantadas” contains ten sketches inspired by Melville’s trip to the Galapagos Islands. The stories here are less directed or tight than some of the stories we’ve talked about up to this point and lean much more into elaborate, contemplative descriptions of nature.
This aspect is one of the elements that makes Moby Dick such a stellar novel, and it works just as well in “The Encantadas”. I don’t have as much to say specifically about these vignettes but they are among Melville’s most famous works. Almost any mention of Melville’s time sailing will mention his trip to the Galapagos, and then mention how that inspired this story. “The Encantadas” is a much different style than most of Melville’s other short works and definitely worth a read.
8. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life
Typee is Herman Melville's first novel (and one of his first published works in general), a fact that is somehow both incredible and completely sensible.
On the one hand, Typee is a fairly straightforward novel, especially by Melville's standards. It exists very neatly within the bounds of nautical literature and follows a pretty strict concept. The novel describes Melville's stay with the Typee people in the Polynesian islands over the course of about three months and focuses entirely on the lifestyle and culture of the people. There's a little adventure mixed in at the beginning and end, but for the most part the novel just gives you nice little vignettes of the various aspects of Typee life. You get very little introspection, philosophizing, or any other editorialization (although he does still weave in some shade at Christian missionaries).
On the other hand, though, somehow the novel is absolutely enchanting. Despite the simple concept and tone, Melville's prose, even this early on, is so magnificent that he just evelops you in a world that feels so wonderful and fascinating. Despite how often people talk about it, I rarely feel "transported to another world", but Typee accomplishes it so well. He describes every detail with love and passion and it inspires so much wonder at a world completely untouched by European influence.
It's definitely not as complex as some of his later novels, but I still found it charming and very much worth a read.
7. The Nathaniel Hawthorne Letters
Okay, this one’s really more just for me, but these things are awesome.
I mentioned Melville’s “friendship” with Hawthorne in my description of “The Fiddler”, but to elaborate, it would be more fair to say that Hawthorne likely viewed Melville as an entertaining (if a bit exhausting) friend, and Melville was, more or less, in love with Hawthorne.
Because of Melville’s particular proclivities toward burning all of his documents (we’ll cover that more in Pierre), we do not know how Hawthorne wrote to Melville in letters, but we do know how Melville wrote to Hawthorne, for better or for worse.
Listen, we’ve all read Melville’s letters to Hawthorne but it’s worth highlighting just how pining these letters are. Melville needs Hawthorne’s attention and approval in a way that ranges somewhere between a mid-tier writer seeking validation from a successful colleague and straight-up romantic obsession.
These letters don’t have the literary quality of the other stuff on this list, I suppose, but they’re so fun to read and such a critical entry point into a deeper understanding of Melville’s style and motivations that of course I’m going to put these high on my list. They’re awesome.
6. Cock-A-Doodle-Doo
“Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” is a lovely portrait of agrarian life in 19th-century America that also doubles as a game in which Herman Melville sees how many times he can write the word “cock” into a story.
Listen, I don’t know if this story is good or if it has the same complexities as some of the lower-ranked stories on this list but wow this story is fun.
There are certainly things going on in “Cock-A-Doodle-Doo” but they all happen within the framework of a man who lives in the countryside and loves wandering the land, talking to people, and looking for a chicken that just sounds oh-so-beautiful.
The remaining works on this list are, let’s just say, a little dense, so it’s nice to put one of the more comedic, fun stories of Melville’s up on the list here as a little palate cleanser.
Also, again, this story is fantastic.
5. Billy Budd
Billy Budd is Melville’s last work of prose, published posthumously after his wife found the scattered pages of its manuscript in his belongings after he died. Billy Budd has a special place in Melville’s canon as one of the core pieces of Melville’s revival in the early 20th century. After it was originally compiled, transcribed, and published, it developed a significant audience that loved the story. Then, a better, more accurate version was published a few decades later that now stands as one of Melville’s most critically acclaimed works.
All the praise that Billy Budd has received over its existence is absolutely deserved. Billy Budd follows the trial of a sailor suspected of murdering his superior on a navy ship. The story intentionally avoids giving factual details and instead focuses on the perspectives of those involved and how they saw the events. It merges some of Melville’s best nautical writing with some of his best psychological writing, and some of his most tasteful homoerotic writing. It’s a nice, tight little package that offers maybe the best singular introduction to Melville.
4. Bartleby the Scrivener
“Bartleby” is Melville’s most famous short work. Everyone has read this story and everyone loves to reference it. Luckily, this story really is that good. Among Melville’s critiques of capitalistic mindsets, “Bartleby” stands alone as his most fascinating and most compelling.
In “Bartleby”, a man hires Bartleby to be a law-copyist for him, with the expectation that he’ll be reading and writing documents and performing other standard copy duties. As soon as he attempts to assign Bartleby work, though, Bartleby returns with the iconic, “I would prefer not to”. Bartleby continues to refuse work in this manner repeatedly, driving the man further and further insane as he tries to understand what could compel Bartleby to act this way, refusing the duties of the job he was hired to do so plainly and confidently.
“Bartleby” is classic Melville. It blends his social and economic commentary with a strange, eccentric character that challenges the other characters’ very understanding of the world and its functions.
Also, it’s so much fun.
Bartleby blatantly refusing to buy into the system that capitalism has laid out for him carries a sublime catharthis with it. He just doesn’t do it. All he does is express that, actually, he would prefer to not work and the entire system starts falling apart around him.
It’s awesome.
“Bartleby” is a must-read if you’re interested at all in Melville. If you don’t actually want to read Melville but just want to know what the fuss is about, this one's for you. It’s short. It’s tight. It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s everything you would hope it could be.
T-2 Moby Dick
Second place here is a two way tie between novels that bookend the most significant portion of Melville’s literary career. The first novel is the one that you all know: Moby Dick. I have no idea who has read Moby Dick and for what purpose. Both of my parents had to read it in high school, but I’ve never met someone my age who has ever read it for any purpose at all. Do people still read this book? Do people even know what this book is?
Well, if you don’t, I’ll explain. Moby Dick is a strong contender for the greatest literary achievement in the history of the English language.
Moby Dick is everything. It’s a beautiful philosophical novel about the ocean, whales, and how they help us understand the divine. It’s a thrilling monster epic about a man’s quest to enact revenge upon the best that took his leg. It’s an in-depth technical manual about the mechanics of whaling. It has boy love.
It’s true that Moby Dick is a slow book that borders on boring occasionally, but that’s the point. This is a novel about a group of men who spend their entire lives sitting around in the beating sun staring at the ocean. The novel immaculately emulates the experiences of sitting around and thinking, diving deeper and deeper into your own thoughts, applying what interests you to what’s around you, and letting those explorations carry you on for hours and hours. If you can find it in yourself to let Moby Dick take its time, you will experience a novel unlike anything else ever written.
Of the Melville novels, unsurprisingly, this is the one to read first. I cannot imagine why you wouldn’t. What, you’re going to read THE CONFIDENCE MAN first??? No! You’re going to read Moby Dick.
Moby Dick is the only novel of Melville’s that received any serious attention in his lifetime. Even at the time, audiences were able to see its greatness and rightfully praise it. It kicked off a decade in Melville’s life mired by his struggles to live up to the novel’s expectations, ultimately resulting in him abandoning prose entirely (save for the unpublished Billy Budd). The final two novels on this list can only be understood as responses to the success of Moby Dick, both as a commercial product and as a work of art. After all, when you write the greatest work the English language has ever seen, is it possible to write one better?
T-2. The Confidence Man
Yes. It is.
If your name is Herman Melville and you’re ready to die.
If Moby Dick is arguably the greatest work in the history of the English language, The Confidence Man, released in 1857 and Melville’s final novel, is DEFINITELY the most technically advanced work in the history of the English language.
The Confidence Man: His Masquerade is a prank. It’s a joke. It’s a bit. On all levels. He literally released the novel on April Fool’s Day. The Confidence Man follows a series of cons and scams happening aboard a commuter ship sailing along the Mississippi River. The final half of the novel follows one scammer, referred to as The Cosmopolitan, as he speaks with a number of the other passengers on the ship.
My copy of The Confidence Man (edited by H. Bruce Franklin) refers to the novel as “America’s first postmodern novel” which really speaks to how ahead of its time this book is. This book came out in 1857. Postmodernism didn’t become popular in art until the 1960s. Herman Melville whiffed on the postmodern craze by, oh, I don’t know, over one hundred years!?!?!?!?
This novel is difficult. Basically every single word of this novel is in some way a reference to either other events of the novel (typically foreshadowing so you don’t even recognize it) and/or a Biblical passage or other written work or just some random cultural event or person. Speaking of my copy of The Confidence Man, this is the one you should use. It’s fully annotated so you can actually know what all the different elements are alluding to. You’ll notice that the book is about half footnotes, but that’s just what the novel’s all about.
The Confidence Man is unlike any other work of art I have ever experienced. It is a work that pushes the formal structure of a novel to its absolute maximum, cramming in as many concepts that language could possibly support. It’s a dense read but I can confidently say that you will never read another book like it.
As mentioned earlier, this is the last novel Herman Melville published in his lifetime. After releasing The Confidence Man, Herman Melville pivoted to poetry for the rest of his life. If you view Herman Melville in the 1850s as a man trying to one-up the greatest novel ever written, The Confidence Man is probably the only possible way you could do such a thing, so it’s no shock that he put the pen down on prose after this.
Melville met with Nathaniel Hawthorne once while writing The Confidence Man and Hawthorne described Melville like this:
“Melville, as he always does, began to reason of Providence and futurity, and of everything that lies beyond human ken, and informed me that he ‘pretty much made up his mind to be annihilated’”
In a metaphysical sense, I think it’s not out of the question to argue that The Confidence Man is a work of literature so profoundly exceptional, so deeply intricate and unique, that the process of writing it killed Herman Melville. After its release he abandoned the medium that defined him because he had pushed it to its absolute limit and left a core aspect of himself behind in the process.
1. Pierre; or, the Ambiguities
HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY
These three famous words were the headline to the New York Day Book’s review of Pierre, when it came out in 1852. They did not lie.
Pierre is, without a doubt, the most reviled, hated work of Melville’s. Its reception upon release was so disastrous that it functionally destroyed his professional writing career literally the year after Moby Dick released. We’ve alluded to the damage that this book did to Melville earlier on but here we can now fully appreciate what this book is.
Pierre is, in a loose sense, a sort of satire of the pastoral, high society novels of writers like Jane Austen. Pierre opens on a young man, Pierre, as he goes on a date with his fiance. Pierre is the heir to an estate and his fiance, Lucy, lives on the estate just next to his. Pierre’s father has died, leaving Pierre, the only child, in charge of the estate and his mother. Upon marrying Lucy, Pierre will take control of the estate. The only thing Pierre feels he is missing in his life, the novel informs us, is a younger sister.
One day, a mysterious letter finds its way to Pierre from a woman who claims to be an estranged half-sister of Pierre. It requests that Pierre come to see her so she can ask for his assistance. Pierre obliges and discovers that this woman claims to be his father’s daughter from a relationship he had with a woman prior to his marriage to Pierre’s mother. She explains that while he was alive, he would offer her financial assistance in secret, but since his death she has been left alone. She hopes that Pierre will be able to help her from now on.
Pierre spirals.
Most of the novel follows Pierre as he grapples with this revelation and the conflict between his sense of duty to his mother and fiance and his familial instinct to take care of his new sister. Pierre is a deep, complex examination of masculinity in American high society.
Back in the section on “The Fiddler”, I remarked on the almost frighteningly transparent nature of Melville’s autobiographical works and that was primarily foreshadowing Pierre. Pierre famously includes a segment that reveals, about two-thirds of the way through the book, that Pierre is actually a world-famous writer but that Pierre prefers to stay anonymous because he does not like the excitement of fame. This passage was added into the novel after the original manuscript was rejected by every publisher Melville took it to. It perfectly demonstrates the absolute openness that Melville brought to his writing, but especially to Pierre. Pierre also features a pivotal moment that involves Pierre burning some family heirlooms, a known favorite activity of Melville.
Pierre almost feels like a novel you were never supposed to read. Sometimes it feels more like a young woman’s diary that should be kept in a locked journal in a hidden drawer of her desk with the key safely on a string around her neck than an actual novel that a well-known, adult male author shopped around to every publisher he could think of. And that’s the beauty. Pierre is beautiful because “Herman Melville crazy” and he wants the whole world to know it.
There are no words I could possibly write to explain what the experience of reading Pierre is like and I can do no more than just implore you to read this novel. It’s exciting, philosophical, funny, and deeply fascinating, wrapped up inside prose equally as beautiful as Moby Dick’s. It weaves between almost every interest Herman Melville has ever demonstrated, discussing the American countryside, American society, masculinity, homoeroticism, homosociality, Christianity, and so much more. It twists and turns unlike any novel I’ve ever read and I’m absolutely, positively obsessed with it.